Ask her how the global cross cultural integration has been done at Piramal Healthcare, and the answer is, “A lot of flying.” She adds, “Ultimately, relationships amongst people happen through face-to-face meetings, and time spent together. That’s how you develop trust, confidence and familiarity.”

Nandini Piramal, Executive Director, Piramal Healthcare Ltd, admits that her level of engagement with HR in the company is ‘not as much as it should be’. In her view, every manager must be thinking about his or her people — all the time.

In conversation with The New Manager, Piramal, who heads four teams including one instituted to deliver operational excellence across the organisation, shares perspectives on her approach to people management and the role of the operational excellence team. Excerpts:

We've moved from being an Indian company where the work force was mostly in India and majority of sales was from India, to a majority of sales coming from outside. Twenty per cent of the 3,000-odd work force is also outside the country today. And this has changed the way we think.

Opex in focus

The operational excellence practice was a little less structured earlier, with a lot more bottom-up thinking and incremental ideas for improvement. We realised that to make really big change, we need top-down (structured) innovation across companies and geographies, combined with incremental ideas for improvement.

The practice was started with the help of consultants. We spent a year with them. As we grew more confident, we did it ourselves. We hired a team with the requisite experience. We looked at things such as, for instance, supply chain costs. We figured how to do it, and took three months, and did it. One year later, we went back and did it again.

With time, the operational excellence team looks at things that are a bit more complicated; it looks at the strategic needs of the business. It's not about cutting costs by about 20 per cent. It's about saying, if we need to grow by 20 or 30 per cent, what do we need to build in the business? What are the processes, people and products we need, and how do we get those?

The idea is to think differently, and to work with teams and businesses to help them think differently. We look to engage with businesses, and provide expertise across different businesses — and take learnings from one business to the other.

We have a business in the US where we sell anaesthetic drugs to hospitals. We have the person who worked on operational excellence on that business, now working with the OTC sales force here, looking at how to improve placement at chemists. You could say that the two are not very similar. Or, you could take learnings from one to the other.

We have a 12-member team in operational excellence that works across geographies. All of their time goes into people, because everything is about people.

You can't tell a business that they need to do something because you're telling them to. You have to convince the business that the extra work is worth it — that it will make their business grow, or their lives easier. You have to win their respect by the value you add.

People mandate for every manager

The ultimate in people management is about how you make it a win-win situation for everybody involved. People have to want to do something for them to execute it well.

In a way, I don't look at HR as a separate function. How you manage people, how you think about people, their careers — that's what a good manager should do. HR does provide structure in how you think about these things. But ultimately, if a manager doesn't think about these things, he's not playing a manager's role.

I need to spend time thinking about what my team is doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what we need to do to train them, and how to ensure they get exposure to other parts of the organisation.

If people are challenged, if they are not doing the same things they were doing a year ago, if what they have done has increased in scope and in complexity, then you have a good chance of retaining them.

Is my team solving the same problems that they did last year? If yes, then I have a problem. Because then, we haven't moved on.'

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